


The Gallery

by ga93kog



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Horror, Lucid Dreaming, New Companions (Doctor Who), Psychological Horror, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, The cat is okay I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:08:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28154364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ga93kog/pseuds/ga93kog
Summary: A strange affliction has gripped Jaqueline's apartment building--four people have dropped suddenly to sleep, seemingly for good. While her neighbors are at a loss as to the cause, Jaqueline has her own set of mysteries: one a sinister something lurking in her room, the other an inexplicable stranger doing the same (guess who, pun intended).





	The Gallery

Ordinarily Jackie would have found nothing particularly odd about coming home to an ambulance parked in front of her building. It was a large complex, and accidents occur in the home, and so on, so statistically speaking it would be unfortunate, yes, but not particularly alarming.

But this was the fourth in as many days. She felt herself watching it as she walked past, though she hated herself for it, straining for a look at the unfortunate laid out on the gurney. A paramedic glanced her way and she could feel the stern pressure of her eyes long after she turned away. 

There were no gawkers, not like after the first incident, but she felt that the ambulance and its retinue were the subjects of close scrutiny all the same. Nothing so bold as a crowd, nothing like what she would expect after a road accident, but here and there the twitch of a curtain, and eyes like hers watching without appearing to do so. Warily, as though afraid to invite its attention. 

The tense atmosphere persisted inside. Jackie caught snips of conversation as she climbed up to her apartment—terse, serious whispers that confirmed her suspicion. The same inexplicable malady, exactly the same as the other three. Out cold, unresponsive, with no apparent cause or injury. None of the others had yet woken, as far as anyone knew. The super was installing new carbon monoxide detectors in every unit, but no one seemed to hold out much hope that it would solve anything. There was talk of an inquiry.

At last she slipped into her own door. She didn’t turn on the light. She stood in the cramped entryway with her back against the door, drinking in the serenity of her dark apartment. Blue and red ambulance lights pulsed across the ceiling. She shut her eyes. A bath, she thought. A bath would do wonders. A good, long soak. With bubbles, and a book. Maybe a glass of wine. And then to sleep. She thought of her bed almost lovingly. She pushed herself away from the door and slid the bolt shut. 

She crossed the living room in the dark, moving assuredly around the dark hulks of her furniture, stepping neatly around the cat toys scattered around the floor, placing her feet carefully in the event that the unseen cat that went along with them should put in a sudden and unexpected appearance. Jackie cocked her ear for the shuffling sound of her paws on the carpet, but there was nothing. Probably she was asleep somewhere, but it was still odd. 

Jackie opened the refrigerator and considered the bottle of wine that had been chilling in the door for an age. She had been saving it for a special occasion, but who was she kidding. She grabbed it by the neck and let the door swing shut.

She was midway down the hallway when she noticed it: a dim sense of something very subtly but just as definitely wrong. She stopped and looked around her, fighting the creeping sensation working its way up her neck. As a child she had hated dark hallways and staircases, and ran up to her bedroom each night with a pack of imaginary terrors at her heels, vaulting into her bed breathless and near tears. She swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat, brought on by the unexpected sharpness of the memory, and struggled to bring herself back into the present. The hallway. The wrongness. She clenched her hands and her fingernails dug into her palms. It hurt, but it was a clean hurt, not the vague dread of old fears. It cleared her mind.

It was so simple she nearly laughed in relief. The photographs. There were dozens of them on the long wall of her hallway, the frames normally squared off against one another in a haphazard grid. Some were crooked now. That was all. She reached out, but something held her back. Her eyes slid over the expanse of wall. She flicked on the light.

During the day, or even in the dimness of early morning when she went to work, she might have missed it. Now, with the overhead light casting its unflattering beam on the frames, it was obvious. Every single one of them was out of square, and every single one of them was tilted in the exact same direction, with their bottoms cocked toward her bedroom door. The irrational urge to run gripped her.

She shook herself. The building was settling, that was all. She forced herself to stay where she was, moving with deliberate slowness until each photograph was properly aligned. It calmed her. She breathed deeply and surveyed the gallery. The frames wanted dusting, but that could wait. For now all she wanted was her quiet time in the tub, which she clearly needed more badly than she’d thought. And the wine. Definitely the wine. At her bedroom door she paused to flip off the light in the hallway. She both did and did not want to look over her shoulder. She clenched her fist and shut the bedroom door behind her without looking back. 

In the hallway every single frame swung toward her bedroom door in unison, as if pulled awry by a stiff wind.

Jackie sat on the edge of the sink, shrouded in a flannel bathrobe while the tub filled. She picked absently at the foil wrap on the wine bottle with a blunt fingernail and wondered if it would be bad form to drink it from her toothbrush cup. She tensed and looked up warily. Had there been a sound? Between the roar of the water and her own edginess she couldn’t be sure. “Moose?” She turned off the tap and listened.

There it was, but it was not a cat sound, nor the sound she thought she heard. What she had heard (imagined?) was a kind of wheezing, but this was different: an odd, empty rushing which was somehow more like the absence of sound than a noise in its own right. Now that she was aware of it, she found she couldn’t ignore it. It was piercing, a word she used to associate with loud things, but now she understood what it really meant. It pierced her mind. It _hurt_. And it sounded as though it were coming from her bedroom. She eased the door open; yes, it was louder now. It was almost a whistle—not an outright, honest, fingers-in-the-mouth whistle, but the cringing, insidious shrill of breath between a badly set pair of teeth. She stuck her head out and was almost disappointed with how normal everything looked. She let out a stream of air she hadn’t been aware of holding.

It took her some minutes to pinpoint it—the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere at once—but at last she did. Under the bed. There was something (or someone, god what was wrong with her, that was all she needed) under her bed. She was uncomfortably aware of her nakedness beneath the robe as she knelt beside the bed, the unopened wine bottle held up beside her ear. (That would be a fine headline, wouldn’t it, _woman clubs home invader with cheap pino_ , what did she think she was doing?) She tensed, steeling herself to raise the dust ruffle, and reached out to grip the fabric.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said a voice. “Oh no, definitely not. Bad idea. Terrible.”

Jackie fell back on her heels with a yelp. The wine bottle fell from her hands and landed with a dull thud on the carpet. She whipped her head around and stared fearfully through the tangle of her hair.

There was a man behind her, leaning in the doorway to her closet as if he belonged there. He raised his eyebrows at her—a part of her mind noted irrelevantly that as eyebrows went they were pretty fantastic, you could say a lot with the merest twitch of an eyebrow like his—and he looked away again with such utter dismissal that she felt absurdly stung. He looked _bored_.

She pushed her hair impatiently out of her face and pulled her robe closer. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

“I’m the Doctor.”

“Doctor what?” she said, and he flinched as though she’d struck him.

“Wrong question,” he said. He stepped out of the closet, fumbling as he did with the pocket of his—what was it, a morning jacket? A pea coat? She had no idea, men’s fashion had never held the slightest interest for her, but the thing was definitely old, and even more definitely odd.

“What?” she said again.

“Nope, still wrong. Now, if you’d be so kind—” He shook his coat away from his hand; she caught a glimpse of a stubby metal wand held loosely in his long fingers. He looked at her and flicked his empty hand at her impatiently. “Come on, come on. Get a move on. There may be a lot of it but time is still precious.”

She scrambled to her feet and backed away against her dresser. The stranger was on his hands and knees, peering closely at the minute gap between the fall of fabric and the floor. Occasionally he pointed with the metal device in wide sweeps against the hem; Jackie couldn’t see exactly what it was or what he was doing, but it flashed and beeped like a child’s toy.

“How did you get in here? What were you doing in my closet?”

He answered without looking up. “I wasn’t in your closet.” He spoke almost absently. He sat up and examined the device in his hands. The end opened like a flower; it flashed and chattered. His eyebrows rose. “Incredible,” he said. “You’ve shoved so much rubbish under this bed that the density of the space beneath it is practically infinite.”

“What?” A distant memory of a years-old astronomy lesson fogged in the back of her mind. “A point of infinite density is a black hole,” she said slowly. She knew how stupid it sounded but she couldn’t help herself. Some inner part of her cringed in horrified fascination as she heard herself ask, “Is there a black hole under my bed?”

He looked at her scathingly, eyebrows atwitch. “What? A black hole? Under your bed? Don’t flatter yourself. You’re messy, but you’re no neutron star. Aside from the fact that the forces involved would’ve obliterated you and most of your neighbors.”

She eyed the walls nervously. “What, the whole building?”

“Everything between here and...” He considered. “Jupiter. Here and Jupiter. Probably a lot further than that. Very messy. No, we’re looking at something much weirder, though how it found any room to nest under there is beyond me.” He grinned at her. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said. “Who are you? And how did you get in here?” She edged forward and peered into the closet. Her breath caught in her throat.

Her closet was a point of contention between her and her landlord. Yes, it was technically large enough to stand in, if the closet was completely empty and she didn’t move her arms too suddenly, but in her book that did not qualify for a “walk in” closet or the premium he had her paying for it.

This was not her closet.

The room she found herself in was circular, or almost circular; its sides were made up of short, segmented panels that rose up between metal ribs. The center was dominated by a column of machinery that went further up than she could see. It seemed to be humming gently. But more than that—

“It’s…” She stepped out into her bedroom, and back inside. “It’s…”

“The TARDIS,” he supplied.

“It’s bigger inside,” she protested. “How is it bigger inside?”

He made a dismissive gesture. “Dimensional engineering, reconfiguration of space-time.” He seemed to sense that another question was forthcoming and clapped his hands at her. “Come on, you don’t want to hear about that! There are a thousand other things more fascinating, and that’s just in this room.”

She looked at him, this peculiar almost-elderly man in her bedroom, and wondered why she wasn’t more afraid. “What are you?”

He looked hurt. “Not a ‘what,’ certainly.”

“Who, then?”

“I told you,” said the stranger. “I’m the Doctor. A friend, or at least a helper.” He picked up the heavily annotated manuscript on her bedstand and flipped through it idly. She resisted the impulse to snatch it away; that study represented years of research, if he ruined it somehow— 

“Not much for light bedtime reading, are we?” he said, and let the thing fall back with a thud. “One of those names is yours, isn’t it? You’re a scientist.” She nodded. “I don’t like scientists,” he grumbled. “They think they know things. What kind, an Earth scientist or a space scientist?”

“Neither,” she said wryly. “I’m what you’d call a people scientist.”

For the first time he looked at her almost approvingly. “Good, that’s much more interesting. The ones who think they understand the universe are difficult.”

“Oh, and you do?”

“Nobody does. That’s the whole point. A universe we could understand would be boring. Who wants to know everything all the time?”

“I’ll bet you know more than what’s good for you,” she said, and he grinned at her. There was mischief in his expression, enough that he seemed suddenly ageless.

“That’s a wager you’d win,” he said.

“You’re an alien.”

He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like that word,” he said. “It’s a word you use for strangers you don’t want to think of as people. I am a person, as it happens, and I’m not a stranger, or rather you lot aren’t strange to me. I’ve been accused of spending too much time here, as a matter of fact.” He shrugged. “But in the sense that I was not born on earth, yes, technically you’d be correct.”

She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “And _technically_ is this your spaceship wedged in my closet?”

“She’s the TARDIS. She doesn’t wedge, she parks.”

Jackie looked back at the humming column of machinery at its center. She felt that it was the center of more than just the room, though she couldn’t guess where she’d gotten the idea. She watched the delicate moving pieces go though their cycles, more complex patterns than she could immediately follow. It was exquisite, finer than clockwork. “Do you know about what’s been happening here? In this building?”

“I can guess. This isn’t a good place to be right now. But she doesn’t have a thing to do with it, nor do I, I promise you that.”

“It’s the thing under there, isn’t it?” she asked. Something he’d said earlier finally struck home. She edged closer to the bed. A nest, he’d said. She shuddered. “What’s under there?” She peered under the dust ruffle, but whatever he had seen eluded her.

“Be careful,” he told her. “You don’t want to wake it.”

“It’s already put four people in the hospital. I know I don’t want to wake it. But what is it?” She reached out to lift the dust ruffle and take a peek.

The Doctor gave a start and lunged to stop her. “No, don’t look at it!”

But she had already lifted it. Everything went pitch black and a strong wind filled the room, lifting papers and small knick-knacks from the cluttered dressers and flinging them around the bed. The whistle was unbearable now, penetrating—no, _slicing_ into her mind with the precision of a surgeon’s knife. She could hear herself screaming, it was tearing her apart with its intensity—

Jackie wakes with a start, gasping for air. She is cold and damp all over with sweat, and it takes her several minutes to remember that she is home, and safe in bed. She sags with relief.

“Moose?” She tries some _swsss swsss_ sounds to call her, while she fumbles on the bedstand for the lamp. The room looks strangely insubstantial in the early morning light, and she wraps her arms around herself. The cat’s warm bulk would comfort her, even if it would earn her a nibble in return. Jackie wonders why she is being so obstinate; even last night when she came home, the furry little nuisance hadn’t deigned to put in an appearance—

Jackie frowns and puts a hand to the side of her head. No, that bit had been part of the dream, hadn’t it? Yes, of course it was, she doesn’t even _have_ a cat. God, what a terrible dream though, not that she can remember much of it. Trying is giving her a headache, but it seems important. Out in the kitchen she can hear the piercing whistle of her phone’s alarm going off. It seems out of place for a moment, wrong somehow, but of course that’s just the dream again. She shudders at the sound, unable to place the shiver of fear working its way across her skin—

She is outside, walking. She feels strange, ill-at-ease with herself. Disconnected, that’s it. Disconnected, as if nothing around her is quite real, or she isn’t. The street is oddly familiar, though she doesn’t stop to think when she might have been here before, or even where _here_ is. It doesn’t seem important. Neither does her destination. It occurs to her that she doesn’t remember leaving the apartment, and that isn’t important either. She is simply along for the ride, wheeling her bicycle beside her—

She looks down at her hands in delight. She has missed this bicycle, her old companion, stolen from the alley behind her apartment years ago, just days after she had first moved to the city. She mounts and pushes off just as smoothly as she remembers. She crests the top of a hill and the neighborhood unfolds all around her. She remembers this hill, her old neighborhood, the house three blocks away where she grew up. How often she used to sail down this hill, pedals locked, hooting delightedly if no one was around. No one is, so she does it now, thrilling in the soaring feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her speed now is exhilarating, it is as though she could fly. The thought surprises her. But of course she can fly, it’s the simplest thing in the world, a small trick, so easy she can’t believe she could ever have forgotten it. All she has to do is _push—_

“Jaquelyn.”

There is a man in the sidewalk ahead of her. She claps her hands over her eyes and braces for the crash, but it never comes. Her bike stops on a dime, without so much as a jolt. She peers through a gap in her fingers; her feet are still on the pedals but she is balanced perfectly, not even a wobble.

The man is still there. Where did he come from? She finds herself wondering if he had simply popped up out of the ground—no, just appeared, out of thin air. It doesn’t seem impossible, somehow. In this place where lost treasures are restored and flying is simple as breathing, nothing does. 

He is oddly dressed, with a mass of grey curls that seem to defy gravity. She knows that face, doesn’t she, or did once? A serious face, stern and craggy. She knows too, that there is a wicked grin beneath, if he has cause to break it out. She has to know him, how could she know that if she doesn’t know him?

“Jaquelyn,” he says again. His look is intense, almost rude. His eyes bore into hers. “Do you hear me?” he says.

It doesn’t seem an odd question. “I hear you,” she replies. An ingrained wariness of strangers makes her wonder if perhaps she should be afraid. But there is that nagging sense of familiarity. “I know you, don’t I? I’m sorry, I have a terrible memory for faces.” The statement puzzles her. No she doesn’t, she has an excellent memory. Doesn’t she? She concentrates. Thinking hurts. How good is her memory? She doesn’t know. It chills her. In a panic she tries to remember something, anything, even the most mindless bit of trivia—

He doesn’t seem to notice her distress. “Moose is all right,” he continues. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Moose?” She knows somehow that Moose is a cat. Whose cat? She can’t remember. She raises a hand to her face and realizes that she’s crying. What’s wrong with her?

“Odd name, Moose, but that’s what she says you call her. She’s safe, in the TARDIS. I’d like her out, but that’s cats for you.” He looks away now. “She’s worried about you.”

At last she finds her voice. “I don’t understand,” she says.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” he says, not unkindly. “Not just yet. I’m afraid I’ll only have your attention for a short time. I need to talk to you about that paper you wrote. It’s very important.”

“What paper?” she says automatically, and then it floods back. An image of this man, in vivid perfect detail, standing by her bed with a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. Beneath her own hands, the bell mounted to the handlebars begins to peal of its own accord, but the sound is wrong, a shriek, the sound of wind between the gaps in her windowsill. This is not her bike, this is something _else,_ and she is frozen in horror, she cannot move, she cannot free herself—

She blinks, dazed. She is sitting, or rather lying, partially reclined in the examining chair in her office. She can feel the leads dotted all along her forehead. The sensation is intensely familiar: itchy, irritating, utterly skin-crawling. She hates wearing them, she has always hated wearing them. There is a man hovering nearby, watching her placidly. “You remember,” he says. “It’s blocking you, and no wonder, but you have to try to remember.”

He seems to be starting in the middle of a conversation they haven’t had yet. “Remember what?” she says, and she can feel the skin tighten and pucker around the leads as her jaw moves. Deep down she knows that pulling on them would be no worse than ripping off a bandaid—she might lose a few strands of hair if Janine was clumsy with the adhesive, but nothing worse than that. She knows that. But deeper still, she also knows that if she moves they will wake up and bite into her, slither into her head—

The man speaks and she is startled out of the horrible image. She looks at him gratefully. “If I tell you exactly what’s happening it will just rip you away again, it’s already done it twice. Every time you start trying to work things out.”

“Work what out? What things?”

He ignores her question entirely. It is as if he has not heard her speak at all. “Hang on to this thought,” he says. “If you remember anything, if you remember only one thing, remember this: you are in control. The only power it has is what you give up. Don’t you give up a shred, do you understand?”

The statement is so outlandish that she merely blinks. He lunges at her and snaps in her face. She flinches back as though electrified—was she? For a moment she thought she’d even heard a buzz— “Wake up,” he says. “This is important. Do you understand? If you’re going to survive this, you have to remember.”

“Survive what?” She senses that whatever he tells her now will be a half-truth at best—perhaps it is her surroundings suggesting it or maybe just something in his demeanor, but she is reminded strongly of the circular conversations with the oncologists just after her father’s diagnosis. None of them would tell her flat out, but she had known. Her chest swells with fury, with grief, with the anguish of being forced to watch, helpless—all so sudden and so intense she feels she must scream just to relieve the pressure of so much feeling in too little space, too little time—and then, just as suddenly, the pain is gone. The relief of it brings tears to her eyes, and in the shock of her reprieve, the source of the vanished pain doesn’t seem important. Her wandering attention latches onto the man in the corner. Is she expected to speak? No, she has asked him a question. He has not answered, but is simply looking at her. No, _observing_ her. It frightens her. Why won’t he answer? “Doctor, survive what?” She blinks, bewildered at her own words. Doctor? Where did that come from?

“You do remember,” he says, and his tone is gentle, encouraging. “It’s there, deep down. Try to find it. I’ll explain it later, if I can. No time now. It knows I’m here, and it is doing everything in its power to keep you from understanding. Just know that I’ll be doing everything I can. You’re not fighting alone.”

This strikes a chord somewhere deep, and she sees his face in the back of her mind, and a voice, not with the earnest tone of here and now but forthright, almost curt. _A friend, or at least a helper._ He said that. She knows this with unshakable certainty. “That was last night,” she says. “You—that really happened.”

He doesn’t answer her question. “You’re not alone,” he says again.

She looks up at him, more frightened by the compassion in his voice than by anything else he has said. “This isn’t real,” she says. “I’m dreaming.”

All around her is the clamor of alarms, the machinery all around going haywire, with herself at the center, and the man in the corner is untouched by any of it, still watching as the sensors fuzz and burn against her forehead, and she screams as they begin to dig and grind and claw their way along her neural pathways, a scream with the pitch and timbre of an overlooked kettle—

She knows this place. She has been here before, many times. She does not know precisely when, or how many, but that the information is there for her if she should care to look is intensely comforting. She does not look. The times before are not important now. 

She feels more alert here. Her vision is sharper, for one thing, but there is a sense of purpose about her now. She is here for a reason, even if for the moment she cannot consciously remember what. It will come to her in time. She does know this place though, its stairs and corridors are as familiar to her as the home of her childhood. She knows its twists and corridors, its secret places, despite how it changes. She knows its walls as well as the inside of her own head. There is a part of her that understands that this is exactly what this place is, that she comes here in the deepest kind of dreaming, and this part of her also understands that this is what she is doing now: she is dreaming, and has been dreaming, but now she is also awake. She is asleep and not asleep, just as this place is real and not real, and she knows from the times before that it is unwise to stay in one place for too long. She begins to move.

The voice, when it speaks, startles her nearly out of her wits. _They’re funny things, dreams,_ it says. It echoes massively. The volume makes her nervous. It is wiser to be quiet here, for the same reason that it is wiser to keep moving. _We don’t think of them as memories, but that’s what they are. All the flotsam and jetsam of the day, ground up into bits and projected onto the backs of your eyes to entertain your brain while the rest of you is sleeping._

She knows better than to try and answer. She recognizes the voice; it is the Doctor, the strange not-alien who had appeared in her bedroom an age or a few minutes ago, and who was also somehow in both of the places she visited before coming here, or being sent here, whichever it was that happened. The memory of those places are fuzzy, but she does remember what he told her. _The only power it has is what you give up. Don’t you give up a shred._ She doesn’t intend to. This place frightens her down to her marrow even at the best of times, has done since she was a small girl, barely old enough to articulate that kind of all-encompassing dread, but this time is different, and not just because she has an ally. She is filled with a new kind of determination, something she doesn’t quite dare to call bravery. She moves on, navigating carefully through the strangeness.

This place is composed not of spaces but of routes, an endless confusion of stairways and bridges and long, echoing halls, and the places in between which only she knows. Jackie remembers them well, the invisible doors that only she can open, to creep upwards through the rafters and hidden attics. To what end, she does not know, and it doesn’t matter. It has always seemed to her before that she is looking for something here, probably not always the same thing, but what it might be has never been disclosed to her. Not that it would help her if she did. This is not a place of destinations. It is a place of movement. Of change. Finding anything here would be a matter of luck and timing, of _not_ looking, or her usual method at home, of pretending not to look and waiting for the hidden thing to jump out at her. She wonders if the Doctor knows what she is searching for. He has not spoken again, not yet, but she can sense him, still there. The idea that he is watching her as she sleeps is reassuring. She can picture him lounging against her bed, perfectly at ease, at home anywhere he lands—no, she corrects herself, he’d be roaming her room, perhaps restlessly picking up and replacing her knickknacks, flipping through her books for something to do with his hands. Pacing. He is not the type to stay still for very long, she knows this without question.

Her nerves tingle with wariness as she slips through the familiar passages. Something is wrong; in this place where feeling watched is the rule and not the exception, she feels hunted, specifically targeted. And that is the answer, of course; it is too empty. It is never a crowded place, but people do live here, strange empty people whose names and faces she can never quite recall. Perhaps they have none. She has come to believe that the denizens of this place are sheets of blank paper, and in other worlds they are drawn upon, made familiar and comfortable in her mind. Players waiting unmade behind the velvet curtain. They walk these halls, near her but never with her. They know she is not truly one of them, even here. She is separate, alien. They watch her wander their domain, these people, opening their doors, but never follow. They are passive. She has never seen one move, though she knows that they must. The proof is all around her. They are gone, fled from something other than the Thing that lives here.

_You can’t survive without dreaming, you know,_ the voice says. The tone is light, conversational, as if they were sitting in her living room discussing the matter over instant coffee _. You’d go mad without it. Even people who say they never dream, they do. They just don’t remember. Quite often it’s for the best. There’s a lot of funny things buried in people’s heads. A lot of it shouldn’t see the light of day, much less the dark of night. The stuff in our heads is more real in the dark than it is in the daytime. Too real, sometimes._

Too right. She knows this as a place of doors, though there is only one door she recognizes by sight before it is opened. The door at the top of the wide stair, the door with two leaves. The door she has never opened. She dares not. The empty people believe the room to be haunted, and perhaps it is in a way; it certainly has the right feel of dread to it. But Jackie knows better than that. She knows the Thing that lives behind that door, not that she has ever seen It. She knows It by the feel of Its breath on her neck, the shape of Its shadow looming on the edge of her vision, the aura of malice that stops her breath and freezes her body into a mortus of fear. The skin-crawling horror of its touch. Yes, it is safe to say that she knows the denizen of that room, and knows It well. Still, she feels that whatever is hunting her now is worse than the Bad Thing. Much worse.

She moves along a catwalk, wide open to the galleries below and around her, her hand laid loosely across the handrail. She walks swiftly. This is not a place for doubt. So many times she has danced across this walkway, she knows it well enough to glide across with her eyes shut. She does not need the rail, and knowing that she does not need it is enough. Self-confidence untempered by caution is recklessness, and recklessness reaps its own misfortune, that is what this place has taught her.

_There are things out there in the universe that thrive on that kind of thing,_ the voice continues _. They don’t exist the way you and I do, flesh and blood and three dimensions. Even I’m constricted to those. It’s what I was born to do but I still need help to move through the fourth. You’ve seen her. The TARDIS. These creatures pass through the dimensions the way you’d go through a gauze curtain. No, more like the way_ wind _goes through a gauze curtain. They just—_

A gale rips through the rooms, tearing at her hair. She screams soundlessly and shuts her eyes against it, gripping the rail with all her strength. It ends as suddenly as it began. She stays stock still, hunched trembling over the rail, waiting to see if it comes back.

_They live on emotion,_ the voice says, perfectly calm, unruffled, oblivious to the fright she has been given. That it has caused, she suspects. She straightens and makes her way swiftly to the other side. She knows the door she is looking for, though where it will be this time she isn’t sure. She pushes onward, half-listening to the voice as she moves _. They flock to people the way flowers turn into the sun,_ it says, _just basking in it, all the wonderful, terrible feelings rushing around inside you. Mostly they’re nocturnal—the strongest emotions lie in memories, after all, and while you’re lying there, sleeping and dreaming…distilled memories, how could they resist? It’s not so crude as it sounds, there is some sophistication to it—they’re connoisseurs, they travel to find the best sensations. They visit your mind like a gallery, sampling, viewing, enjoying. They savor the emotion and they move on, satisfied._

She senses movement, not behind her or anywhere she can see, but close. There is an urgency to her movements now, as she opens and weaves and pushes through the haphazard structure of this place. It feels different now. Upwards, ever upwards, through the attic spaces that have twisted themselves against her need. It seems somehow unfinished here, incomplete. The walls are wrong. Doors are missing, or changed in some fundamental way so that they no longer lead where she believes they should. Onwards she crawls, climbs, squeezes through these newly unfamiliar crevices. Something bad is at work here, some malice is working actively against her.

_And, of course,_ the voice says, _some of them are vandals. The worst are thieves. Every species has its bad eggs. In the past few days this one’s done the equivalent of destroying four lifetimes of priceless works, touching, smearing, digging through the archives, altering and editing to please itself, devouring all. Alexandria’s library, censored beyond recognition and burning away into eternity, lost to history forever. They might well have never existed._

_This is unforgiveable._

A door fastens itself shut behind her and she pauses to get her bearings. Here should be the room with the high ceiling and the trapdoor in the far wall. The number of times she has squeezed through that narrow passage, she knows where it is, of course she does, but the door mislead her. Instead she finds herself on a wide landing, halfway up a long, shallow stair. She knows this place. She avoids it.

At the top of the stair, the two-leafed door stands open. The Thing within is stirring. Behind her there is a whisper of sound—no, not sound. A muffled intake of breath, wheezing, painful, somehow self-satisfied. It carries an impression of slavering, a gaping maw, though she doubts this creature has any such thing, at least not in a way that she can understand. She doesn’t dare turn to look, and put her back to the open door, to the Bad Thing as It wakes. Has it herded her here purposely? Does it know what lives behind that door, and _want_ it somehow?

_But I doubt very much,_ says the voice, _in all of its travels and atrocities committed, that it has come across someone who is able to control their dreams. It is not a common thing in humans, and it knows this. Why else would it restrict itself to your planet, your species, when there is so much else in the universe to satiate it? The same reason most hostile lifeforms choose Earth. The same reason I spend so much time protecting it. You cannot defend yourselves. But you, Jacquelyn, are uniquely able to fight back in this case, because of the knowledge you possess. Think. Remember._

It flies into her mind with a suddenness that is almost painful. Her paper. The research she and Janine have been working on together for years. Countless sleep studies, dream journals, plugging each other into that hateful machine when no volunteers were available, monitoring their brain waves as they slept in the squashy chair in their office. The shock and delight to both of them when they realized that she, Jackie, had begun dreaming lucidly.

On any other night, in any other dream, the force of the realization might have startled her into waking. Not tonight. This creature will keep her asleep, as it is keeping four others asleep, until it is sure it has gotten every last drop from her. She squares her shoulders and mounts the staircase, taking each step as deliberately as she can. If she runs, the Thing inside will know she fears It. No, that’s a stupid thought—It already knows she fears It; It has tormented her since her first night terror, long enough ago that she has no real memory of that initial encounter. They know each other well. In a way they _are_ each other, and from such a Thing there can be no concealment of thought or feeling. No, if she runs, It will chase her, because it is in Its nature to chase her. So she approaches the door quietly, not timidly. She pushes the leaves together and the latch catches with a delicate _snick_ that echoes through the stairway.

“no,” she whispers. The sound doesn’t carry, not at all. It is like speaking into a wool blanket.

The creature behind her hears. It howls, a terrible keening wail that she hears as only a low susurrus but still fills her entire headspace, pressing in on her on all sides. She can feel its fury: perhaps it is her own, caught and defiled and radiated back out at her.

“ _no_ ,” she says again, louder. Her voice comes out as a croak, as if hoarse with disuse. Has she ever spoken here before? She doesn’t know. She pushes the thought aside. Later. She has time now, all the time in the world, but carelessness reaps its own misfortune. She feels a small smile growing in the corners of her mouth: wild, irreverent. Her. “this is mine, all of it.” Her voice is stronger now. She places her palms against the door to feel the breathing of the Bad Thing inside. “even this. this place is mine, and you will not touch another piece of it.”

The howl builds, swelling to a fever pitch she recognizes. She can feel the pressure of it against her mind, not as sharp as it was; it is as if it is trying to puncture her with a fist now rather than a needle. Even here, in the innermost sanctum of her mind, it thinks it can control her. The sheer arrogance of it enrages her. She can feel her temper building, growing in her with the same suddenness she remembers from another dream, though the reason for it escapes her. Was _taken_ from her. What else has she lost tonight? Again she feels the prodding of the creature at her mind, not blunt now but insidious, creeping, a tentacle rather than a fist. She shuts it out without thinking how she is doing it. “NO.”

The word tears from her with a force that in the waking world would surely have harmed her, rendered her throat raw and bloody and speechless perhaps permanently, and she does feel something breaking but it is not her voice. In the next moment it is as though a membrane around them has ruptured, there is wind again, silent and terrible, strong enough that the very walls around her ripple and bow, but here she stands, untouched by the tumult. Her shout echoes across the stairways and passages and galleries, fills every particle of space with the intensity of her refusal, and behind her the sound that is not a sound has been all but drowned out but still she can feel it, agony now rather than fury, she can feel its thrashing but does not dare to turn, no, her nightmares have enough ammunition without adding to it—

“Jacquelyn Ning. Wake up.”

Her eyes flew open. At once she tried to move, an instinct left over from her time in the other place, but she could not. She was heavy, so heavy, like being trapped under the lead x-ray apron, but worse. Her fingers twitched in a panic, her breath wheezed between her lips without sound as she tried to scream. She had to move, It would find her, hunt her—

“You’re all right,” a voice said. “You’re safe. I promise. Here.” She felt strong hands on her shoulders, easing her upright. Her head lolled back a little. It was a moment before she recognized the uninspiring view of her bedroom ceiling. “The rest of you is still asleep,” he said, and this time she recognized the voice. “Focus on breathing in,” the Doctor said. “Deep breaths.” Jackie did as she was told and felt herself beginning to relax, the iron-hard tension draining from her muscles. “Good. Keep breathing. Count your heartbeats, do you remember your journal? Show me with your fist.” He demonstrated, moving her hand into a loose fist, and releasing it.

She did remember. The exercise was as difficult as it always was, but little by little she gained more movement and her racing heart slowed. As she counted them she realized she could feel the Doctor’s heartbeat as well, thudding against her back where she was slumped against his chest, a syncopated rhythm far more complex than hers. Before she could begin to work out the implications he pulled back from her, delicately helping her to find her own balance against the bed. She folded her legs beneath her and tucked her feet under her robe. She didn’t feel steady enough for standing. Not yet.

Jackie looked at him then, and noted how perfectly her memory had captured him in her dreams. She wondered what part of her had realized how important he would be, and stored him down to the finest detail. Something deep, certainly. He seemed anxious beneath his unflappable demeanor, all of his focus on her. “Is it gone?” she asked, and her voice was the same croak it had been in the other place. She swallowed hard. It hurt.

The Doctor folded his arms across his chest and leaned against her dresser. One finger tapped restlessly against his elbow. Jackie couldn’t interpret the gesture; was he troubled, disturbed? Or simply thinking deeply? “Yes,” he said finally. “Irretrievably. It dug in too far, pushed you deeper and deeper to get at what it wanted. Too deep. It entangled itself too firmly into your mind to free itself in a hurry. Whatever it experienced there undid it.”

“I heard you,” she told him. Her voice was steadier, but still rough. She resolved not to ask him if she’d been talking in her sleep. Screaming in her sleep. No. She’d ask Janine. “I heard you speaking to me, when I was there. I saw you.”

He shook his head. “Just a projection,” he said. “Just my voice, with a little amplification to make sure the message got through.” He showed her the chattering device from his pocket, quiet now. “Amazingly versatile, sonic technology.” The device disappeared back into the depths of his coat.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for helping. For coming here.”

His eyes still hadn’t left hers. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen him blink yet. “Sheer chance,” he said. “Though I would have come, if I’d known. It was nesting, drinking in the atmosphere, testing the waters for its next meal. It caught me in its field.” His mouth twitched. “Like a black hole, if you like.”

“You must have heavy memories,” she joked, and knew immediately that she had said the wrong thing, as she so often did. It was his eyes. His expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes had dimmed. 

“Yes,” he said. “I do.” 

She shivered. There was a weight to those three words that she wouldn’t have thought possible. She wondered if she ought to apologize, but thought better of it. It wouldn’t change anything. “What about the others?” she said. “The people it got at before me. They’re in the hospital.”

“They’ll be waking up about now, I expect.”

“And their memories?”

“Gone. It will be difficult for them.”

“Isn’t there anything—”

“I am no stranger to lost memory,” he said shortly. “I have forgotten and been forgotten. I know how terrible it is. What that creature did is despicable, enough to make it a pariah on any world in the universe, even to its own kind. If there was anything to be done to reverse it, I would have already done it.”

“You told me you could move through dimensions. Like they do, only in your ship.”

He nodded, though she sensed a certain reluctance in him. “The TARDIS.”

“Yes. You meant time travel, didn’t you? You’re a time traveler.”

“Time travel can only repair so much. Once something is gone, that’s it. I’ve learned it enough times now that the lesson ought to stick for a while.”

Jackie nodded. She wasn’t disappointed. She’d lost her faith in cure-alls a long time ago; her own experience had taught her that sometimes even the most cutting-edge science wasn’t enough. It was somehow comforting that this held true in civilizations more advanced than her own. “I wish I knew what I forgot,” she said.

The Doctor looked at her, his expression sympathetic but not pitying. No–he was looking in her direction, meeting her eye, but not _at_ her, she thought. It made her a little uneasy, as though she had suddenly become transparent. Finally he broke eye contact and looked in at his ship. He seemed troubled in a way he hadn’t before. 

“Doctor,” she began, and then an odd sound like a chirp broke her thought. That was an animal sound, wasn’t it? She scooted nervously away from her bed.

“Ah,” said the Doctor, peering down at his feet. A round furred face was peering out at them from around Jackie’s closet door. “Good,” he said. “About time you got out.” He gave her a gentle nudge with his foot and the cat sauntered out. She climbed delicately into Jackie’s robed lap and began kneading. Jackie rubbed the cat’s ears absently. The tag on her collar said MOOSE, with Jackie’s address on the reverse side. That was all right, then. She’d always wanted a cat.

“Well,” the Doctor said briskly. “Your feline is returned, and you’ve got rid of one of your two unexpected houseguests. It’s time I removed myself, as well. Busy night ahead.”

And without waiting for an answer he stalked into her closet. A door that didn’t belong to the apartment closed behind him. A blue door. She expected a roar of engines, perhaps flame or an explosion, but the ship simply wheezed and vanished as she sat and stared. 

She scooped the cat into her arms (Moose, her name is Moose, and no wonder, good grief is this cat _heavy_ ) and stepped into her closet. It was just the same as always, cluttered and constricted. No sign of anything strange or wonderful or in any way out of the ordinary. Moose squirmed and chirruped impatiently in her arms and scurried out the door the instant Jackie let her down on the floor. A moment later she heard her meowing, and a scratching that could only be claws on her bedroom door. Jackie left her closet reluctantly and let the cat out without looking down the hall. She had already decided to avoid her small gallery for a few days. The faces she remembered would comfort her, but those she didn’t would be worse than anything she had faced in her nightmares. She shivered and shut the door.

She felt unsure of herself, at a loose end. The clock on her nightstand told her it was just past eight. It surprised her; she felt as though it must be nearly dawn. She might as well take that bath, she supposed. And yes, her bottle of wine was still beside the bed on the floor, half hidden by the bedskirt. She pushed it out with her foot and rolled it a fair distance from the bed before picking it up. Maybe she’d be better off sleeping on the couch tonight. (Might be easier just to move. It was a stupid thought, but maybe not stupid enough to ignore entirely.)

The water in the tub was icy, so she drained it and started over. The bath didn’t help as much as she had hoped, nor did the wine. She admitted to herself that the latter had probably been a mistake. Wine always made her maudlin. Bundling up in her pajamas did what bathwater and alcohol hadn’t: the tank top was hers, but the baggy sweatpants had belonged to her father. She couldn’t remember when exactly she had stolen them, but that was probably normal forgetting, wasn’t it? Whether it was or not, she knew with a certainty that exhausted her: she would wonder, for the rest of her life, every time she found she couldn’t remember a name or a face or a date—

A whining, wheezing sound in her living room startled her into full alertness. Jackie forced herself to relax. It wasn’t the same sound. She’d know it in an instant if she ever heard it again. This didn’t have the same penetrating quality. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t a figment of her overwrought imagination, either; Moose was beside herself meowing at it. (She wondered if the neighbors could hear her, and was surprised to recognize it as a thought she’d had before.) The sound died away as she padded down the hallway. She flicked on the light and let her eyes adjust.

There was a blue phone box in her living room. She told herself that it couldn’t be him, it looked nothing like a ship, not even an alien one—not at all airworthy—but she recognized the door. It opened as she watched, and the Doctor leaned out, frowning around him with the air of someone trying to gauge the weather.

His gaze fell on her where she stood in the doorway, and he looked her up and down swiftly. “Jaqueline,” he said. “Good. How long have I been away? You look the same.”

“Um. An hour, maybe.” She was taken aback, both by his casual arrival and by his appearance. By the looks of things he’d had a rough time of it; his trousers were stained and the bottoms of his shoes caked with mud, his jacket rent along one of the seams. “What—”

But the Doctor wasn’t listening. “Happens every time,” he muttered. “She never takes me back where I left off.” He stepped out of his ship, still looking around interestedly at her tatty furniture. “Not even the same place this time, either. Deplorable. Where are we?”

“My apartment, and please take your shoes off. What happened to you?”

“Mm?” He looked down at himself and seemed surprised by the mess. “Oh. Right.” He bent and began untying his laces, absently shooing Moose aside as she darted in to bat at them. “Had a little run-in in 1968. Very messy. Got a little more involved than I had in mind.” He stood and ran his thumb along the tear in his coat. “Pity, I rather liked this one. I don’t suppose you have a needle and thread anywhere?”

“No, sorry. I can put some tea on. Do you drink tea?” Without waiting for his answer she busied herself in the kitchen, filling the kettle and rummaging in her cupboards for teabags. Tea for visitors was something her mother had always insisted upon, and that the memory was still there was as comforting as the familiar ritual of tea-making. When she looked up again the Doctor was busy studying her refrigerator magnets.

“What was in 1968?” she asked him.

He answered without looking up. “Lots of things. It was a busy year on this planet.”

She pushed a mug into his hands. He looked up at her, startled. “Tonight,” she said. “What was in 1968 tonight?”

“Right, yes. I’m sorry, it’s been a long night. Lots to keep track of.” He took a cautious sip from his cup and nodded. “Thank you. I’ve spent the last one hundred thirty-six years watching reruns of other people’s lives. I went and asked them, and they all wanted to go back and see. All four. Knowing what your life was isn’t the same as remembering, but it’s something.” He drained the rest of his tea and set it aside. “Good tea,” he said.

Jackie stared at him. “One hundred and thirty-six years?”

“A drop in the bucket. I know what an eternity is.”

She threw her arms around him and squeezed. “We don’t,” she said. “Thank you.”

For a moment Jackie was worried she had done something wrong; he was standing so stiffly she was certain she had committed some serious breach of interplanetary etiquette, but he relaxed and patted her hesitantly on the shoulder. (Probably not a hugger, then. Neither was she, come to that.) “It’s what I do,” he said. “It’s what I have to do.” He disentangled himself and looked into her face. “How about you? I don’t suppose I really need to ask.” She shook her head. He looked pleased. “Good.”

Jackie followed him out to his ship and was caught again at its incongruous appearance, though she supposed it would look less odd out on the street than in her living room. She made a note to ask him about it sometime. Later. 

He stooped to pick up his shoes, and as he straightened he caught sight of Jackie, close behind him. He frowned at her. “What are you doing?”

She stopped in her tracks, suddenly doubtful. Had she misunderstood? “What’s wrong?” she said. “Can’t I come?”

“Of course you’re coming, that’s why I’m here. But really, Jaqueline…” He looked her up and down with growing concern. “Don’t you think you ought to at least bring a jacket?”


End file.
